a blessing for when there’s no cure for being human

God, I feel it again, the burden of being human, and the fact that nothing will exempt us from the pain of it.

Wherever you go, you bear yourself, and always find yourself. Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, transl. Leo Shirley-Price, 1952.

Blessed are we, Your human creatures,

with mind and soul and spirit bounded in flesh and bone,

struggling in the seeming conspiracy against progress,

against the perfection that our minds can grasp and our hearts long for.

God, how we yearn for the completion of all things.

and we try, oh how we try to hurry it along

with our self-help elixirs,

slurries with a touch of truth and a handful of goodness, enough to be effective, for awhile.

The gospel of hustle, or of positivity, or peloton

but then life happens and we realize all over again that we are human, frail and finite,

and that there’s no cure for that, despite illusory promises that say otherwise.

This is where we live, in this reality.

Come help us in our humanity. help us enjoy all the beauty that is here, the sweetness that comes to us unbidden. The light that gives us eyes to see.

It’s not all up to us, thank heaven.